Fat people are more prone to heart attacks.

Fat people have a better survival rate for heart attacks.

A recent study shows that fat people have a decreased risk of in-hospital death following acute myocardial infarction (a heart attack), despite having other conditions like hypertension (high blood pressure), hyperlipidemia, and diabetes.

Association between BMI and acute myocardial outcomes

This is just another study showing what the healthcare profession call “the obesity paradox” is real.

Paradox:  (noun)  a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that when investigated or explained may prove to be well founded or true.

• a statement or proposition that, despite sound (or apparently sound) reasoning from acceptable premises, leads to a conclusion that seems senseless, logically unacceptable, or self-contradictory.

“a potentially serious conflict between quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity known as the information paradox”

• a situation, person, or thing that combines contradictory features or qualities.

“the mingling of deciduous trees with elements of desert flora forms a fascinating ecological paradox”

Why is it absurd or self-contradictory that a part of the populace that is prone to a certain medical condition has developed ways of coping with the medical condition they are subject to?

One of the ways evolution works is “natural selection”

Natural Selection leads to an evolutionary change when some individuals with certain traits in a population have a higher survival and reproductive rate than others and pass on these inheritable genetic features to their offspring. Evolution acts through natural selection whereby reproductive and genetic qualities that prove advantageous to survival prevail into future generations. The cumulative effects of natural selection process have giving rise to populations that have evolved to succeed in specific environments. Natural selection operates by differential reproductive success (fitness) of individuals.

Note the word “natural”.

Fat folks have been around for as long as there have been folks to be around.  And clearly, we are reproductively successful.

If being fat was, as the healthcare and diet industry would have us believe, an automatic early death sentence, or as society as a whole would have it, “unfuckable”, fat folk would be few and far between.  Instead, there are more fat folks around than ever before (much to the alarm of the healthcare industry and much to the glee of the diet industry).

We are told, over and over again, fat equals unhealthy.  Fat equals an early death.

Yet, to paraphrase Marilyn Wann, “Where are the piles of fat dead bodies?”

It is not unnatural for fat people to exist.

Some fat people are unhealthy and will die early.

Some thin people are unhealthy and will die early.

And some won’t.

It’s life.  It’s a crapshoot.

Fat, thin, and in between, we are all going to die for one reason or another.

You know what fat people aren’t evolved for?

The stress of dealing with all the health trolling that we have to deal with.

You want to help fat people’s health?

Stop concern trolling us, stop spreading fatphobic myths, stop fat shaming (no, it’s not for our “own good”).

That shit is hard on a body; and that kind of stress can cause real damage.

We’re not evolved for that – yet.

But you can bet my fat ass, we’re working on it; and we’ll get there.

Because evolution works.